National Stop the Frack Attack Movement Launches

Maria Pena of Long Eddy, New York said, “I’m here because I want to stop the envi­ron­men­tal ter­ror­ism that frack­ing will cause.” Deanna Petula, a mother from Carlyle, Pennsylvania added, “I’m very upset about what’s hap­pen­ing. It’s awful. As a mother of three young chil­dren I’m con­cerned with their future. How will I explain this, what we let hap­pen to our state 20 years from now, leas­ing state forests, water with­drawals from the Susquehanna River where we live down­stream from it and depend on that water?”

Millie Cassese, a court reporter in New York City and a mother who has roots in upstate New York said, “I became con­cerned four years ago. I’m con­cerned about water, air, my envi­ron­ment and the way of life that we have. I think what’s hap­pen­ing with big oil and gas here is hap­pen­ing all over the coun­try. Big money and the cor­po­ra­tions are tak­ing over. We need a grass­roots effort to stand up and make these voices heard. If we don’t we’ll be in trou­ble and so will our kids. The whole coun­try is being taken over by money. We have no power, except our­selves, going in a bus and being united. This is an oppor­tu­nity for every­day peo­ple to come together; the whole coun­try should be wak­ing up to what’s hap­pen­ing. So many peo­ple don’t know what this will do to their lives. As a court reporter for 32 years I have been in the mid­dle of cor­po­rate lit­i­ga­tion and have seen what the cor­po­ra­tions have got­ten away with and how much the coun­try has changed in the last 30 years.”

The rally started at 2pm on Saturday on the West Lawn of the Capitol. Rally speak­ers included Calvin Tillman, the for­mer mayor of Dish, Texas; Doug Shields, for­mer Pittsburgh coun­cil mem­ber; Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org; Josh Fox, direc­tor of the doc­u­men­tary Gasland; Wes Gillingham, pro­gram direc­tor of Catskill Mountainkeeper, and numer­ous other com­mu­nity lead­ers and res­i­dents of states affected by fracking.

Bill McKibben said, “As this sum­mer proves, between drought and wild­fire and heat wave we’ve got to keep car­bon in the ground. There’s too much up there already so we can’t be frack­ing for more or drilling or min­ing for more. Our job is to keep it under­ground. We’ve got to take our real swing now.”

Tim Ruggiero, who now lives in Pilot Point, Texas, intro­duced him­self as for­merly of Decatur, Texas where he had to leave because of drilling in the Barnett Shale. He trav­eled to the rally with the for­mer mayor of Dish, Texas, Calvin Tillman, who was also forced to flee his home and con­stituency because of the dan­gers to his fam­ily liv­ing in close prox­im­ity to drilling.

Ruggiero said, “I’m here with for­mer Mayor Calvin Tillman, we’re rep­re­sent­ing shaletest.org, a non-profit set up to help as many peo­ple as we can to pro­vide base­line water test­ing for peo­ple that have been neg­a­tively impacted to test their water and their air for the peo­ple who are not finan­cially able to afford such test­ing.” Ruggiero con­tin­ued, “All I can share with you now is that my fam­ily and I are vic­tims of the shale and we were for­tu­nate enough to be able to get off the shale, but I’m here because there are hun­dreds, if not thou­sands of other peo­ple that are trapped by shale gas drilling.”

When I brought up water issues, he said, “We need to have an abun­dance of cau­tion when it comes to our fresh water. It’s not an unlim­ited sup­ply and we’re going through it faster than it can be replen­ished … we as a species, includ­ing Mother Earth are going to be in some seri­ous trou­ble… If indus­try isn’t con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing ground water, you’re try­ing to tell me that it’s pro­vid­ing drink­ing water [water buf­faloes] out for peo­ple out of the gen­eros­ity of your heart or do you have a vested inter­est in not expos­ing the dan­gers that are actu­ally in the water that you the indus­try are actu­ally cre­at­ing and putting in there?”

Chip Desimone of Damascus, Pennsylvania said to me, “It’s a direct threat to the water, prop­erty val­ues and my health. I’m so upset, as a vet­eran of Vietnam; it feels like we’re fight­ing another war.”

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